The paper describes the activities of central counterparties (CCPs) and the international framework for those activities. It also provides an overview of the activities of the CCPs in the EU. Against this background, an initial assessment is performed of the possibilities of introducing a CCP in...

We examine the degree of natural gas market integration in Europe, North America and Japan, between the mid 1990's and 2002. The relationship between the international gas marker prices, and their relation to the oil price, are investigated through principal component analysis and Johansen...

Private savings mirror consumption behavior. In Europe, the dynamic of consumption is very low, and at the same time, savings are increasing. Is this a result of macroeconomic policy? A GMM estimator is used to analyze the determinants of private saving in the EU?s 15 member states. Our main...

The conditions under which European monetary policy is likely to be conducted are investigated by means of multi-variate time series modelling using aggregated data of all eleven European Monetary Union member states. A cointegration analysis identifies two stable long-run relationships, one of...

The aim of this paper was to shift the focus from a negative prejudice about immigration towards a much more positive evaluation. More and more the migration pattern changes from a blue-collar migration of low qualified workers towards a whitecollar mobility of highly skilled professionals. It...

Income-expenditure surveys typically provide incomes on the household level. As households can differ in size and needs, a reliable assessment of inequality in living standards, therefore, necessitates the conversion of the original heterogeneous into an artificial quasi-homogeneous population....

In general terms, the general Common Transport Policy (CTP) objectives of the European Union may be formulated in efficiency, regional development and environmental categories. Setting objective targets in the environmental field based on scientific evidence is not yet possible, so that it is...

A flurry of recent articles has argued on the basis of constructed European widemonetary aggregates that the demand for EURO's will be more stable than thecurrent demand for national currencies. In policy circles this seeminglymoderating effect of monetary integration figures as an additional...

The forthcoming creation of a single European currency area will likely have farreaching impacts on the competitive position of European industries, as a result of a decline in transaction costs and currency risks for intra-European trade. These impacts will take place independent of the...

We propose in this paper a likelihood-based framework forcointegration analysis in panels of a fixed number of vector errorcorrection models. Maximum likelihood estimators of thecointegrating vectors are constructed using iterated GeneralizedMethod of Moments estimators. Using these estimators...